Infinity Strash: Dragon Quest The Adventure of Dai – Review of Infinity Strash: Dragon Quest The Adventure of Dai – bankruptcy towards adventure

Hadora, for love of softness

Ah, Dai, finally Fly, finally… One of my first mangas in its good old edition I Read, and at the time I hadn’t touched a single Dragon Quest, preferring the FF series from the former rival turned ally… It’s a well-deserved return to the origins, the manga from the very end of the 80s being itself a derivative of the Dragon Quest games with Kōji Inada and Riku Sanjō at the helm under the supervision kindness from Yūji Horii, the creator of the series. Despite a great success, the first animated series only covered the first ten volumes (out of 37) of the manga before being abruptly interrupted – three films in the following years completed the story as much as possible, but it is in 2020 for the thirty years of the manga that a new animated series is announced for the following year, reviving the hope of having a series this time adapting the entire manga with excellent production. The first series had received the care of big names of the time within the Tôei studio attention, and it is the same studio which produced the 100 episodes of the complete which was completed just ago a year… Which is starting to go a bit far for this video game adaptation which cannot then benefit from the aura of an ongoing anime and must therefore rely on residual hype from fans… It will be enough of a spark as Poppu (and a certain singer) would say, a gesture, a word of love, to light the fire in our hearts, and that is what we expect from a Infinity Strash which looked promising on paper with first trailers full of cell shadingAvan Strashes and messy hair.

The game is separated into two distinct and complementary modes: the inevitable Quest mode (story mode, you will understand) and Sanctuary mode. In the first, it is a question of following the story of the manga to the letter and already several points itch quite strongly. The biggest problem is the progress of the game: without any possible exploration, we follow the progress of the story chapter after chapter, alternating chapters of cutscenes (with still images…) and chapters of combat in places mostly ridiculous in size and duration: the overwhelming majority of fights will take place without any difficulty in a very modest arena and will end in 2 to 3 minutes. In a few rare cases, we are allowed to advance in a corridor connecting 3 or 4 of these arenas in a simulacrum of exploration, but no chapter ultimately takes more than 10 minutes, and again I’m being generous… If we add to that a gameplay ultra simplistic attacks/dodges/furies based on one button = one action, we have the furious impression that the game could very well have spilled over from consoles to land on mobile alongside the late Dragon Quest: A Hero’s Bonds, the game mobile announced at the same time as Infiny Strash and already decommissioned at the end of last April, less than two years after its launch. A sort of omen for its cousin on consoles perhaps… The one and only satisfaction is that the quest mode ultimately goes further than feared and therefore does not stop at the end of the fight against Baran, but just at the start of the Holy Sword arc. However, the story mode ends extremely abruptly even though the big enemy bosses have not yet been defeated, which exponentially increases the frustration and incomprehension in the face of so many clumsy choices in the game.

The quest mode is VERY divided into short chapters

You can switch people at any time

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Henki have faith now?

The Sanctuary, a boring grind mechanic

Apart from the quest mode, another mode is available and is exclusively dedicated to grinding… The Sanctuary is a place where you can mainly descend the “labyrinth” of Remembrance, the main mechanic of which is to have to choose between two doors after each room /arena giving a choice between two buffs to gain in the next room; the two choices will be randomly selected from: attack, defense, skill or magic buffs; or amber counters or even treasure chests. Obviously, the lower we go, the harder the arenas will be and we will have a good laugh while facing slimes in the level 7 or 8 which are PV bags while we broke out the same ones at level 1… Why sweat with different skins after all. There’s also a chance that one (or both) carries some sort of evil aura; it will simply be a fight against one of the game’s bosses, once again with a difficulty scaled to the level of the game. labyrinth. I put this name in italics, because it remains a straight line, there is no impact in choosing one path rather than the other unless you choose one buff or another, and in 99% of cases we head without hesitation towards the boss doors since they are the only ones to give a truly interesting buff…

You should know, however, that character levels in quest mode and sanctuary mode are uncorrelated; we always start a descent with characters at level 1. The only way to have an increasingly tough character is to equip Memories cards gleaned for a part in the quest mode and for the vast majority in the labyrinth of Memories – hence its name, yes… In fact, each Memory card represents a panel of the manga of a key moment, a shocking sentence or an attack or pose of a hero. These cards can then be improved, still in the sanctuary (but outside the labyrinth…) in exchange for ambers (rewards for each room of the labyrinth) and “scraps of memories” which are accumulated each time you pick them up. a new copy of a Souvenir card; for example, if we collect the same card 5 times after having already collected it the first time, we will have 500 souvenir points (the scraps) and we can upgrade the card and therefore its buffs against these points and amber. The sanctuary also allows you to improve skills and spells a little in exchange for gold distributed in abundance during the story mode and stones again to be gleaned in the two game modes.

You have to choose a door between each room…

…and grind Memories

We must therefore go down this maze again and again to grind cards and stones to improve all this stuff, crossing combat arenas of 2-3 minutes with the watch in hand (the game even pushes you to complete challenges in less than two minutes to increase rewards…) in a completely random order. It is not at all uncommon to go through the same room several times, or even in a row: I had to face the same monsters to burst in less than a minute four times in a row. It’s an understatement to say that it’s incredibly off-putting and, excuse me, annoying. The usefulness is to hunt for Memories, which will not please the fans to be completely honest (yes, that includes me), the other usefulness being the improvements without which certain boss fights become really brutal with a drastic increase in difficulty from one chapter to the next (before then going back down).

Fly, you fools

Any boss in the game can be faced…

The overall result is bitter and the carrot of a boss hidden in the depths of the labyrinth of Memories once the quest mode is completed in addition to the Souvenir cards to be collected rather than collected, is not enough to hang on longer than the end of quest mode. Oh, there is indeed an additional challenge difficulty but what’s the point in eradicating a few clusters of sporadic monsters? We are far from a Dynasty Warriors and apart from the boss fights which are the only really tricky ones sometimes, we don’t even have the feeling of being overwhelmed by the armies of Evil, defeating a dozen skeletons, slimes and other gargoyles who move as quickly as me wake.

The game was announced with great fanfare, but here they are very sad three years later seeing the moribund result. One wonders what the ambitions of the game’s producers were: did they want to honor the manga and its new animated version which was more than successful; or simply take advantage of the success and popularity of it by creating a game using mobile game mechanics and selling it for €70? If we take into account that from the start it was planned to adapt only part of the story, probably to sell a second complete game a few years later, we are more than tempted to choose the second door. A small detail which sums up the slightest economy in the game, all the cutscenes (apart from the rare ones of a few seconds produced with the game engine) are made of still images even though the cartoon has been finished for a long time and these passages could have largely been extracted from it to really look like something presentable.

In the end we find ourselves faced with a mess (not even half-hearted), clearly not up to the standard of the manga or the price of the cake (or the digital edition). I wish I had loved him; I’ll love to forget it in my game library, unfortunately.

…including bosses of bosses

Test carried out on PlayStation 5 by Bardiel Wyld from a version provided by the publisher.